Tara Isabella Burton, Strange Rites: New Religions for a Godless World (New York: Public Affairs, 2020), 320 pp. $38 (hardcover), $17.99 (paperback), $12.99 (ebook).
The article examines the religious biographies of Polish Traditional Wiccans in three aspects: leaving their first religious formation (in most cases, Roman Catholicism, the dominant religion in Poland), initiation to Wicca and the significance of the “coming home” metaphor. The gathered source material comes from field research: participant observation combined with semi-structured interviews with thirty-one respondents (half of the whole Wiccan milieu at the time of research). The Rambo and Farhadian seven-step model was used to analyze the conversion process and the Streib, Hood Jr. and Keller typology with Danièle Hervieu-Léger’s “religion in movement” to analyze the deconversion process. Three categories of reasons for leaving the Church are distinguished, five categories of reasons for choosing Wicca follow. The “coming home” metaphor proved to be a well-known and important motive in the respondents’ narratives.
In 2008, a legal case, “The Maetreum of Cybele, Magna Mater, Inc. v. Nancy McCoy [tax assessor)] &c., et al., for recognition of tax-exempt status between the Maetreum of Cybele, Magna Mater Inc. and the Town of Catskill, New York” began. The court was asked to decide whether the pastoral work of a Pagan church could be viewed in the same way as the clerical work of other accepted religions. The court also needed to determine how much of the landholdings must be dedicated to worship space. The rulings have been cited as precedent in other cases. In addition, they can act as a rallying point for other new religious movements and Pagan groups to fight for equal legal status.
The article analyzes the course and methods of the spread of Christianity in medieval and early modern Europe, particularly the politically and ethnically fragmented areas of the northern half of the continent. Based on a study of contemporary literary sources, it presents a typology of the ways in which conversion to Christianity was achieved, or the reasons why the natives were willing to accept a change of religion. My analysis shows that missionary strategies based on theological argumentation and criticism of local polytheism usually had only a minimal effect on the Pagan natives. On the contrary, successful missionary methods on most of the European continent were based on offensive political pressure, variously combined with power and economic incentives, the attractiveness of the material culture of Christian countries, or also the religious interpretation of “signs” in favor of Christianization by the natives themselves. I suggest that any positive response to Christianity by northern European Pagans was based on associations between cult and practical prosperity that were characteristic of Pagan religious thought.
